| Beyond Lampoon
Harvard=funny. But this town is full of class clowns Ivy Leaguers don't have a monopoly on humor. "Only Canada has a monopoly on humor," proclaims Trevor Crippen, editor of the Northeastern Times New Roman, the area's newest college humor magazine. He has a right to be touchy. When it comes to college laughs, you hear about Harvard's Lampoon, which has Conan O' Brien among its alumni. But it's not the only game in town. 
MIT has the humor magazine Voo Doo and Emerson has two publications; Hyena and Lauph. And Harvard, the institution that created the form over 100 years ago with the Lampoon, has spawned another publication with The Demon.
There's nothing wrong with too much humor, says Lauph editor Eric Larnick, since each magazine peddles a different type of comedy. "Lauph's appealing to one mindset, Lampoon another." An example: Lauph's themed issues deal with popular culture jokes from the writers' childhoods like their recent Nintendo issue, printed to look like a video game instruction manual. The Lampoon features more theatrical humor, with much of the content dominated by short plays. Andrew Brooks, editor of Voo Doo, says the MIT magazine tries to be clever without being pretentious. "Though we are at MIT so we don't mind injecting our natural geekiness from time to time." Times New Roman assistant editor Andy Gineo says Northeastern's campus-centric fake news stories take their cues from the national publication The Onion. Their recent April Fool's issue features a mock story on escalating faculty violence on campus. Adam Malamut, editor of Hyena says there is even a big difference between Emerson's two publications. "We're dealing with Emerson, which is a very sensitive liberal population and if we have to be offensive to be funny, we will. Lauph is generally a little tamer." The issue titled, "From the Desk of Lauph," features an e-mail exchange between a pornographer who won't digitally remove the twin towers from a movie he has made and a viewer who is having difficulty masturbating to it because of 9/11. This is the magazine that is "a little tamer." The Demon runs preposterous parodies like "lost issues" of Family Circus, with the lovable characters engaging in unsavory activities. Regardless of style differences these mags all share an occasional flirtation with the profane. Zach Kanin, president of the Lampoon, says they have had a good record lately, but that might change with this semester's issue. "We're about to get in trouble soon," he admits, "and that's all I can say." Brooks says Voo Doo is no stranger to controversy, but if you don't like what you're reading you should just turn the page, whether it's the superhero based on female genitalia or the 50's TV and religion send-up of 'Leave it to Jesus.' "At the end of the day you have to make people laugh, but as editor I try to make a statement wherever possible as well." LAUGHTER 101 Harvard and Yale disagree on who has the country's oldest humor magazine. The Yale Record started publishing in 1872, four years before the Lampoon, but did not start writing humor for several years. The Record was initially a "Godawful boring weekly sheet," says former Record Chairman Michael Gerber. What the two do not dispute however, is that they both looked to England's Punch magazine for inspiration. Ivy Leaguers across the country soon responded with their own interpretations of humor magazines. There is Princeton's Tiger (founded in 1882), Stanford's Chaparral (1899) and Dartmouth's Jack O' Lantern (1908). Pat Healy Back |
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